Thursday, 27 November 2008

Week 14: Reflect on different kinds of online communities

Requirements for this week:
You should now have more understanding about the difference between a community, a group and a team. Also how the roles of a teacher, moderator and facilitator differ and the diverse range of skills each role needs. Spend this week reflecting on what you have learned so far about different online communities and the roles and skills required of an effective facilitator.

Community, group and team

Community is a general term for people gathered together around common purpose, goal or interests. According to wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groups_of_people), the definition of a group is stated as following:

“In
sociology, a group can be defined as two or more humans that interact with one another, accept expectations and obligations as members of the group, and share a common identity. “

I believe members in a group may develop more closed relationship by having common interest, heading to same goals and more important, by interaction between group members. As
Kay indicated, a group could be formed within online community. With the group for this course group members did develop a closer relationship compared with those outside the group. As Nellium, Minhajj and I formed the team for the practice of facilitating online session, I feel in the team, each of members need to do their job properly and collaborate with other team members working towards a specific goal. Maybe in a team they have a same goal, specific task to complete, so members need to plan, organize, share and exchange information together, working together to achieve their goals. From my experience of facilitating online session, I feel the interaction and relationship between team members is more active and stronger.

Teacher, facilitator, moderator

It was a challenging topic for me before we start the practical facilitating. I am happy after that, through practice I learned more about these three roles.

We are familiar with teacher’s role. Teacher is the one delivers information, gives instructions and provides demonstration to students. Like my guest speakers I invited to my session, they prepare their speeches and deliver information on the topic to our attendance. My role as a facilitator is asking questions, directing the discussion and activities. I tried to encourage attendants to think and discuss more about the topic and by applying facilitating skills guiding attendants approaching the solutions. In my online session Nellium worked as a moderator. She stepped back and helped with technical issues, handling with speech control. She started the session, monitored the whole procedure and ended the session at the end.

4 comments:

Elaine Dittert said...

Hi Joy
I still can't get to listen to your event it keeps saying it cannot connect or something...sometimes I hate technology!!!
Glad to see that you too have realised the differences that Leigh wanted us to - how moderating and facilitating is so very different from our current teaching role. I just did not appreciate how very different these roles are. I'm glad you had someone else to help you along with your event, it was quite stressful wasn't it?? :-)
I guess you have the same two papers left to do that Kay and I have - so will "see" you in 2009! Have a great holiday
Cheers
Elaine

Joy said...

Hi Elaine

I am not sure why my session is not available in your computer. It's okay here. Never mind, let's forget about it and looking forward to the start of the other 2 papers ^_^

Wish you have a wonderful Xmas

Joy

Leigh Blackall said...

I am seeing the WizIQ recording ok too.. looks like a job for ms fix-it Elaine :)

I was wrong in my comment eslewhere on your blog Joy.. the recording is not on Blip.tv.. it is still a recorded session with WizIQ.

Not to worry. I'm not sure how Nellie gets the recordings out to Blip (she did this for Minhaaj).. but its a good way to back up the session and give people other options for accessing it.

Not to worry.. it is there :)

Leigh Blackall said...

I'm really pleased so many people have come around to seeing the difference between teaching and online facilitation. I see that the teachers among us are still trying desperately to relate the content of this course to their teaching work :) (who can blame them really).. but I also hope that you can see that facilitation of online communities is about a lot more than mere teaching, and that if you can master the skills across many platforms, new career opportunities could emerge for you.. OR.. your teaching could become a whole lot more holilstic!